Drop City

warden--a male warden out of a Jimmy Cagney movie, that is--and she came out from behind the bead curtain that masked the grill from view with his ham and cheese on very old rye wrapped up in a sheet of waxed paper. Her name was Lynette, she was in her fifties, and it would be a long cold night of a long cold winter before anybody looked at her twice. Skid Denton was sitting at the other end of the bar. Sess knew him as a denizen of the Nougat, the only other place where you could get a drink in Boynton, population 170. “Hey, Lynette,” Skid said, “Sess is going into Fairbanks for a little shopping, did you know that?”
    She set the sandwich down as if it weighed a quarter of a ton, gave a smile that barely wrinkled her lip and took a drag of her cigarette. She only worked here. She'd only just started. She was trading free rent on a shack out back for zero wages and zero tips and all she could eat and drink when Wetzel Setzler, who owned the place, was away. As he was now. “That so?” she said, glancing from one of them to the other.
    Sess looked away. He was impatient. Time to go, oh yes indeed, and he could already picture the wide familiar planed dirt road rolling under his tires, and then the first pavement he'd have seen in eight or nine months stretched out as smooth as black ice coming into the city, and then the stores and the houses and the saloons. He drained his beer, shrugged.
    “Going to get him a wife, isn't that right, Sess?”
    He remembered in that moment why he didn't like the man--he talked like a tourist's idea of a sourdough, though he'd been raised in Los Angeles and had a degree in French literature. “You know, pick up some flour, eggs, milk, a new wife, that sort of thing--”
    Lynette was wearing a faded flannel shirt buttoned up to her throat, blue jeans and boots. Her hair was cut short as a man's, she'd driven up from Seattle in a brand-new Pontiac station wagon and nobody knew whether she was married, divorced, a spinster or an ex-nun. She wore a pistol in a snug leather holster that looped over her belt, and to Sess's mind that marked her as a particularly dangerous brand of oddball, the kind who come into the country to play out their Technicolor fantasies of the Wild West. “What you wearing that gun for?” he'd asked when he ordered the second beer. She gave him a defiant look. “Protection,” she said. “Protection?” he'd echoed. “From what?” The stony look now, the look of a thousand bars and dancehalls and another thousand nights alone staring into the black hole of the TV. “It's not bears,” she said. “Or moose or wolves either. It's the two-legged beast worries me.”
    Now she said, “New wife? I didn't even know you had an old one.”
    Could he dignify the question with a response? Was it worth the time and effort? Did he want to act inappropriately, act out, tell her to go fuck herself and then maybe bounce Skid Denton's head up and down off the bar as if he were dribbling a basketball downcourt through a swarming defense? No. No, he didn't. The fact was that he'd never had a wife of any kind, new or old, because the last woman--Jill--who'd spent a lush summer and a sere and broken-hearted winter in his twelve-by-twelve log cabin with all the appointments, or at least necessities, had embarrassed him. People still talked about it. People still shook their heads, as if it were some kind of joke, some kind of routine he'd gone through--and Jill had gone through--just for their amusement. A soap opera. A TV show.
    He scraped his change up off the bar, having a little trouble with the dimes because he'd chopped off the tips of his fingernails with a penknife just this morning as part of a general effort to spruce up his image. He tucked in his shirt, wheeled and headed for the door. Where he paused, the door open a crack so that the outside mosquitoes and the inside mosquitoes could change places, the agenda they seemed most intent on throughout the duration of their brief bloodsucking lives. “If I get lucky,” he said. “Real lucky. So wish me luck.”
    He let his mind drift during the long drive in, watching in an abstracted way for game, rolling down the window so he could smell the country and the chill coming up off the Chatanika River. A handful of cars passed him going the other way, a camper or two, but this wasn't a busy road, even in the best of times--like now. In winter, once it snowed, the road was closed, drifted in, iced up, landslid